Darin Brown wrote:
Here we do run into an issue which esp. tricky in this particular case. By its very nature, webcomics and the webcomics community are going to eschew the more traditional verification mechanisms, most esp. those found in print. Of course -- the entire phenomenon itself is based around the internet. The entire *community* itself, its own internal verification procedures, its own internal conditions upon which it deems verification necessary, are non-traditional. It is disingenuous to hold it accountable to similar verification procedures as say, mathematics or physics. You are not going to find thousands of references to webcomix in the academic literature. And it will be very difficult to find many in print. The fact is, the phenomenon of webcomix itself is highly radical and raises serious issues about the nature of verification itself
Oh, it's much better than that. There is in fact a real genuine actual peer-reviewed academic journal on comics called ImageTexT (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/). One of the managing editors is Phil Sandifer, who you will know better as Snowspinner. In a jawdropping assumption of bad faith (which is, of course, the reason why AFD is so poisonous to the Wikipedia community in its present form), the AFD regulars did their damnedest to get coverage in it excluded from the webcomics guidelines *because* Snowspinner was the editor. The excuse was that he was too involved or too close or knew too much or something.
This was after they'd driven off a previous comics expert for knowing more than them on the topic, leading him to say "you people are clearly idiots" and form Comixpedia.
geni will, if he reads back, agree that this is closer to the chronology of what actually happened in the formation of the comics inclusion guidelines: (1) provably bad AFD, (2) deliberate attempt to exclude academic expert for being an expert, (3) guidelines then formed such that the bad AFD would have led to a deletion.
(Don't take my word for it - read the talk page, it's amazing. Note in particular the direct assertion that editors who confess to knowing *NOTHING* on a topic should have their opinions count just as much as an actual provable expert, for the purposes of achieving "consensus" - remembering that the AFD jargon meaning of "consensus" is a two-thirds vote. Therefore, that a two-thirds majority of editors who *admittedly* know nothing at all about a topic can get the topic excluded from Wikipedia altogether over the objections of experts on said topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Webcomics/Notability... )
- d.